


Out of the Nest

by mosylu



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, adventures in Metahuman Parenting, teenagers amirite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-24
Updated: 2018-10-24
Packaged: 2019-08-06 20:08:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16394267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mosylu/pseuds/mosylu
Summary: Cisco and Caitlin are having a lot of trouble with their rebellious teenage daughter. But they get a different perspective when Iris turns up on their doorstep after twenty-four years of radio silence, asking them to help her find a missing Nora.





	Out of the Nest

**Author's Note:**

> Y'all I am So Intrigued by the icy way that Nora is treating Iris as of 5x02 (and of course, poor Iris not knowing why). Here’s my exploration of a possibility, with future Killervibe and Killervibe babby because you know. It’s me. 
> 
> Also, there is a minor DC character named Angel, but I wasn't able get many details, so Rebecca has nothing to with her.

Slamming doors were unfortunately not a new sound in the Snow-Ramon household these days. So when the crash reverberated through the ground floor and echoed down into the basement workroom, Caitlin looked up from her microscope and prepared herself to play umpire.

But only Cisco came storming down the stairs, muttering under his breath in Spanish. “And you’re grounded!” he yelled back up the stairs.

“I didn’t do anything wrong!” their daughter shrieked back. Another door slammed, and footsteps thundered up the stairs one floor above.

“Motherf -” Cisco breached away, and a proximity alarm went off. Caitlin checked it, and just sighed when she saw it was the one on the roof.

Cisco breached back a moment later, red in the face. “She left from the roof. Broad goddamn daylight, not even wearing her sky camo.”

“Imagine that,” Caitlin said. “A sixteen-year-old girl, behaving recklessly.”

Cisco was exaggerating somewhat. It was almost dark out, far less risky for Rebecca to be in the sky. And if Caitlin knew her daughter, she was headed out to sea, where nobody would see her but a few random boats and fish.

Of course, it wasn’t totally risk-free. But then, nothing was.

He swung around, shaking his finger. “Do you know what your daughter did?” 

“Oh, so she’s my daughter now?” she asked, adjusting her magnification and checking her sample again.

“She was walking around Freedom Park at dusk, all cute little girl texting and ignoring the world, with her purse open. The only thing missing was a holo flashing over her head saying MUG ME!”

Caitlin jerked away from the microscope. “She what?”

“Yeah, thought that would get your attention.” He crossed his arms.

The last time Rebecca had provoked muggers on purpose, pictures of the “Angel of Coast City” had spread all over social media. Thankfully, nobody had gotten a clear shot of her face, but a teenage girl with a five-foot wingspan was distinctive enough.

It had required half a day of feverish hacking and trolling on Cisco’s part to make everyone think it was a hoax or a publicity stunt, while Rebecca sulked in her room and Caitlin tried to talk sense into her.

“You always take Dad’s side!” their daughter had stormed. “Don’t you even trust me?”

“This isn’t about sides or trust, sweetheart, this is about your safety. You’re sixteen!”

“I’m not a normal kid, but you never let me do anything! Why do I have these powers if you’re never going to let me do anything?”

“We’re not saying _never,_ we’re saying _not yet._ Maybe next year - ”

“You said that last year!”

She wasn’t wrong, but the memory of the messes they’d gotten into with their own powers at the beginning chilled Caitlin’s blood. And they’d been grown adults with the fully formed pre-frontal cortices to show for it. Rebecca was impulsive, arrogant, and reckless - in other words, a normal teenage girl with extraordinary powers.

And she’d done it again?

“Oh, she’s so grounded,” Caitlin growled now.

“Not only is she grounded,” Cisco said, pawing through a drawer, “I’m locking this on her wrist when she’s asleep tonight.” He held up a power dampening cuff.

“No,” Caitlin said.

“But she - ”

“I said no.” Grounding was fine. Locking her own powers away without her consent was not. She was their daughter, not some criminal they were dropping off at the police station.

Cisco opened his mouth, saw the look on her face, and set the cuff back in the drawer. He dropped onto the couch with a groan. “She’s giving me grey hair,” he moaned, putting his hand over his eyes.

Caitlin rolled her chair over next to the couch and ran her fingers through his hair. It still fell in lush waves to his shoulders, but now the waves were streaked liberally with silver. “It makes you look distinguished,” she said affectionately.

He caught her hand, pulled it over his shoulder, and kissed it. “This kid of ours,” he said. “What the hell are we going to do with her?”

She rested her chin on the high arm of the couch. “Maybe next year we really should - ”

“Nuh-uh.”

“You didn’t even hear me out!”

“I know what you were going to say, and she’s way too young.”

“I’m not proposing that we send her into the Corners on her own, I’m just saying maybe we should consider some training.”

“She’s sixteen!”

“And she’s had her powers for three years. It did me far more harm than good to not explore my powers.”

“She’s not you. She has wings, not frost. And when that happened, you were an adult.”

“I know all that, but she’s getting frustrated, honey. For her entire life, we’ve been helping people, and we’ve taught her to do the same. She wants to help people.”

“And wear a badass suit and see her hero name in the papers.” He scowled. “Angel,” he muttered.

“You’re just annoyed you didn’t think of it,” Caitlin said.

He huffed and looked away, unable to deny it.

Caitlin had just opened her mouth to argue some more when the doorbell rang. They looked at each other.

“You expecting anyone?” Cisco asked.

“No,” Caitlin said. “Maybe it’s one of Rebecca’s friends?”

“House, screen,” he said, touching the wall above the couch. “Front door.” A screen popped up on the wall, showing a twirling hourglass for a split second as the house system searched for the front-door cameras. “Her friends would just ping her, they - Caitlin.”

At the sound of his voice, she looked up and the figure she saw on the wall made her suck in her breath. “It can’t be.”

“Looks like it can,” Cisco said.

“After all this time,” Caitlin said. “What is she doing here?”

He swung his legs to the floor and hopped up. “We’d better find out.”

They were halfway up the basement stairs when the bell rang again. The sound of the third chime was just dying away as Caitlin pulled their front door open.

“Hi, guys,” said Iris West-Allen.

There was a lump in her throat. “Iris,” she managed.

Cisco didn’t say anything.

She had changed her hair, was the first thing Caitlin noticed. It was a short bob, cut just below her ears. There was a frosting of gray at her temples, and lines around her eyes, but otherwise she looked like the woman who’d been one of their closest friends for eight years.

And a virtual stranger ever since.

She cleared her throat. “So,” she said. “Ah. Can I come in?”

Caitlin snapped awake. “Of course! Please.”

Cisco grumbled in his throat, and she elbowed him. “I didn’t realize you had our new address,” she said.

“I have two Pulitzers and access to the Internet,” Iris said. “It really wasn’t that hard.”

“So why did it take twenty-four years?” Cisco snapped.

Iris looked away and didn’t answer.

Caitlin led them into the living room, grabbing a handheld game and one of Rebecca’s shoes, and sweeping the coffee table clear of her medical journals and a PalmerTech drive that Cisco had brought home from work. She dumped it all onto an out-of-the-way chair. “Would you like a seat?”

“I’m all right.” She drifted around the room, aimless as a dandelion on a windy day.

Behind her back, Cisco gave Caitlin a goggle-eyed look. She could only return it with the same amount of bafflement.

What was Iris doing here?

She paused in front of the photo collage projected onto the wall. “So this is Rebecca?” she asked, watching as a family selfie at Pride a few years ago faded into their daughter’s most current school picture.

“That’s her. Yes.”

“I got the birth announcement,” Iris said, her face still turned away. “I’m sorry I didn’t - ” Her fingers moved restlessly on her arms. “That I didn’t send anything.”

Caitlin couldn’t bring herself to say anything like _that’s okay_ or _we understood._ Because honestly, they hadn’t. The radio silence from Iris had hurt immeasurably.

“So you adopted after all?” Iris asked.

“We were thinking about it,” Caitlin said. “But then I was throwing up and just feeling very run down, and Cisco took me to the ER.”

“Dragged her,” he said. “And they were like, congratulations, have a cigar, papa.”

Iris looked around, wide-eyed. “But the doctors said it was impossible.”

She should know. She’d held Caitlin’s hand through all the crying jags, all the cursing at God and her own body, all the long slow path to acceptance.

“They did,” Caitlin said. “And yet here we are.” She managed a smile. “Barry always did say we’d become the impossible.”

At the name, a heavy silence fell.

It wasn’t that she and Cisco never said his name. They talked about him sometimes, between themselves. They couldn’t help it. Pretending he’d never existed would be like amputating ten years.

But Iris had fallen to pieces on the day he’d disappeared into the speed force. April 25, 2024, the day that was foretold since the beginning. Despair had visibly eaten away at her for months, until the day that she’d stood in front of them at Star Labs and said, “I got a job at the Daily Planet. I’m taking the baby and moving to Metropolis. I can’t stay. I just can’t.”

Once she’d left, contact grew ever more sporadic until by the time she’d been gone a year, emails went unanswered, texts stayed unread, and voicemail messages were never returned.

By then, Central City had become unbearable enough that when Cisco said, “I got a job in Coast City,” Caitlin had simply said, “When do we leave?”

Maybe it was their own fault for letting Barry become the center of their lives, to the point that when they lost him, those lives collapsed. Looking at Iris now, Caitlin awoke to a fresh sense of her own good fortune, that she’d had Cisco with her as they sought a new life together. Iris had been alone in Metropolis except for a little girl who only knew that her whole world had been upended.

Cisco broken the leaden silence. “What do you want, Iris? Why are you here, after all this time?”

She turned to face them, her face set. “I didn’t know where else to go.”

The hard expression on Cisco’s face softened. “What happened?”

“Nora’s gone.”

Caitlin felt her throat go cold and her stomach twist. “Gone?”

“Not dead!” Iris said. “Not - I don’t think - ” She shut her eyes, pressing her lips together. “She lives in Central City now. She’s a CSI with the CCPD.”

“Just like Barry,” Cisco breathed.

“I thought that would be enough for her. But when I talked to Ralph a few months ago, he told me she’s been patrolling. She has a mask and a suit - she calls herself XS.”

Cisco made a face. “Like, Extra Small?”

"Like Excess, honey,” Caitlin said. “Right?”

Iris let out a sad facsimile of a laugh. “When she was little, I used to tell her she couldn’t do everything to excess. Apparently she decided to prove me wrong.”

“Where did she get the suit?” Cisco looked vaguely insulted that Nora hadn’t called on him, for suit or name.

“The Flash museum,” Iris said. “That suit I wore for one day. You remember?”

“Oh right!” Caitlin said. “I do.”

“Yeah. Except the display case is empty, and when I asked them about it, they gave me a whole load of excuses about how it needed restoring.”

“Excuse me,” Cisco said. “It barely got a day of wear and every one of Barry’s suits looks fresh as a goddamn daisy - ”

“I know what bullshit smells like. Obviously, they gave it to her.”

“So she has a name and a suit,” Caitlin said. “Following in Barry’s footsteps in every way.”

“Seems like it,” Iris said. “But now she’s - I haven’t heard from her in weeks.”

“Weeks?”

Iris had gotten wildly overprotective after Barry’s disappearance, as if the speed force might reach out and snatch Nora, too. She’d needed to know where her daughter was every minute. How had that relationship devolved to the point where it took weeks of no-contact for Iris to get worried?

“We don’t talk much anymore,” Iris said, her eyes sliding away again. “She blames me. For taking her away from Central City. From her father.”

Caitlin shook her head disbelievingly. “You didn’t take her away from her father. The speed force took him from all of us.”

“But we never went back. I couldn’t. Not even when she moved there. Have you gone back? That whole town is a memorial to him. It’s horrific.”

“The Flash museum is quite something,” Caitlin allowed.

“It’s not just the museum,” Iris said. “There are statues, did you know that? The park was renamed, I think there’s a couple of streets - ”

“Every time you turned around, he was there,” Caitlin said.

Iris nodded mutely.

While Caitlin wouldn’t have called it horrific, Central City had still been a tsunami of memories the few times they’d gone back. While it was hard, it was nice in a way, too. Caitlin couldn’t fathom the depth of pain that must have kept Iris away from her childhood home and the family that still lived there.

Iris cleared her throat. “Anyway,” she said. “When I realized how long it had been, I tried to get in touch, but I couldn’t raise her. When I checked with him, Ralph said he hadn’t seen her around lately. She took a sabbatical from work, her social media is dead silent, and her place looks - well, abandoned is the only word.”

“You have a key?” Maybe Iris’s relationship with her daughter wasn’t as grim as all that.

Iris snorted, sounding for a moment like her old self. “The day I can’t sweet-talk some underappreciated building super into letting me into an apartment is the day I hang up my press pass.”

Caitlin found herself smiling.

“Anyway, he probably would have opened the door for anyone who promised to pay her back rent. She was two months late.” She twisted her necklace in her fingers.

“Did you find anything in her apartment?”

“Besides dust and a disgusting refrigerator? She had information on her dad everywhere. Timelines in chalk, articles all over the wall - it looked like Barry’s murder board. You know, the one he had for his mom? She was obsessed.”

“What do you think happened to her?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know anything for sure. But she had a bunch of calculations on time travel.”

“You think she went back,” Cisco said, getting it before Caitlin did. “To see her dad.”

“I hope she did,” Iris said. “The other options are - they don’t bear thinking about.”

The same things Caitlin feared for Rebecca rose up again in her head, with the happy little girl they’d known long ago at the center of the nightmare scenarios.

Tangled with the wrong meta. Captured by traffickers. Kept prisoner somewhere.

And one more, specific to speedsters: Caught in the speed force, next to Barry.

Cisco’s face had fallen into somber lines. “If she went back, maybe we saw her back then. Do you have a picture?”

Iris tapped her watch and held out her wrist. A holo sprang to life of a pretty young woman with a big smile. There was something in the curve of her cheek like Iris, something in the tilt of her head like Barry. “This is the most recent. From her FaceGram. Do either of you guys remember ever encountering her in the old days? Even once?”

Caitlin had to shake her head. “No.”

“Maybe she watched us from afar,” Cisco offered. “I mean, time travel does screw things up, and her research would have told her that. Maybe she was careful, trying to minimize her impact, and we didn’t notice her.”

“She might have tried. But I know my girl.” Iris’s chin trembled. “Eventually, she would have given in to temptation and wanted to meet Barry face-to-face. And he never would have kept that from me.”

“You got anything of hers?” Cisco asked. “Let’s rule out some possibilities first.”

Iris reached in her purse and pulled out an earring, passing it over. He took it out of the ziploc baggie and sat on the arm of the couch, concentrating.

After three decades of practice, he was very good at it. His eyes popped open within a minute or so, and he looked at Iris. “She’s not anywhere in this time or this universe,” he said.

“Oh my god,” Iris said.

“That’s actually better news than it sounds like.”

“How?”

“Well, first-off, it actually confirms she did go back in time.” He got to his feet and tapped the wall. “House, screen.”

A screen popped up on the wall, several dancing Pokemon frolicking around to a blast of peppy music. He blushed. “Ha-ha, Rebecca must have left her game running, the little stinker.”

While his back was turned, Caitlin shook her head. Iris raised her brows and pointed surreptitiously at Cisco, and Caitlin laughed silently and nodded. Iris put her hand over her mouth to hide the smile.

For a moment it felt like no time had passed at all.

Cisco shut down the Pokemon game and brought up a whiteboard app that he wrote on with the tip  of his finger. “So, we know new universes are created when a timeline diverges.” He drew a line, then made it fork, sending one upward and one downwards. “We’re here.” He indicated the top line, then ran his finger back to where it forked. “This is where Nora jumped back to.”

“When is it?” Iris asked, leaning forward.

“No idea,” Cisco said. “But her being there created this divergence.”

Caitlin nodded, catching his drift. “No matter how careful she was, she would’ve changed things just by her presence. Maybe she got in line at Jitters and made someone behind her miss the train they would have caught. Maybe she crossed against the light and forced someone to brake, where if they hadn’t slowed down, they would have had a fatal accident at the next intersection. There’s so many little things that we do every day and we don’t even know how they change the world.”

“And by changing the world, she created a new one.” He traced the lower fork to the end. “So that universe is here, running parallel to this one. That’s why I can’t find her.”

Iris blinked. “Yeah,” she said. “That makes … sense. Okay.”

“I can jump to other universes easy peasy, but it’s a lot harder to jump back and forth along the timeline,” Cisco said. “I’ll do my best, but I don’t know if I can go back to retrieve her.”

“It’s not about retrieval,” Iris said. “I just want to know that she’s safe. And not caught somewhere in time, or in - ” Her face twisted with anger. “In the speed force. If she’s with Barry in the past, he’ll take care of her, but she doesn’t know what she’s doing.”

“Well, none of us ever did when it came to time travel,” Cisco said, narrowing his eyes at the forking timelines.

“No, I mean as a speedster.”

Caitlin whipped her head around so fast her neck popped. “What do you mean? Didn’t her powers come in with puberty?” That was what they saw with most second and even now third-generation metas, who inherited a metagene rather than having it change them after they were grown.

“They did,” Iris said. “Around thirteen or fourteen. But I would never let her use them.”

Cisco gaped at her. “She’s - what, twenty-five?”

“Twenty-six, honey,” Caitlin said. “Her birthday is the month before Rebecca’s.”

“Right, right. That’s like half her life.”

“I know that,” Iris said defensively. “But there’s plenty of heroes now. You two, and Ralph, and others. It’s not like when the accelerator first exploded. Nora didn’t need to put on a suit and risk her skin every day. She could have had a normal life.”

“Is that what she wanted?”

“She was a kid. She didn’t know what it could be like. The secrets and the lies and the danger -  Anyway, there was plenty of time. There was always plenty of time. I kept telling her, next year. Next year.”

It sounded a little too familiar for Caitlin’s comfort. “You must’ve given in at some point,” she said. “You said she was patrolling now.”

“No,” Iris said. “I didn’t. I think she’s trying to figure it out on her own. From displays at the Flash museum and home experimentation.”

Cisco opened his mouth, then rethought whatever he’d been about to say.

Iris knew that was dangerous. She knew how hard it had been for Barry to master his powers even with their support and the technology at Star Labs. A rogue speedster trying to teach herself - what kind of catastrophes could she embroil herself in?

And how had Iris let it get to that point?

Their old friend touched her watch again, looking sadly at the beaming girl. “I couldn’t lose her,” she said in a cracking voice. “I’d already lost Barry. If Nora never developed her powers, then the speed force couldn’t get her. I guess that’s really what I thought.”

Cisco met Caitlin’s eyes again, then looked away.

“And then the day after she graduated high school, she packed everything she owned into her car and moved to CCU.” She put her hand over her eyes. “You know what’s funny? The speed force didn’t do anything. It didn’t have to. I lost her before she ever started running.”

“Iris,”  Caitlin whispered. “Oh, Iris.” She got to her feet and crossed the room to put her hand on Iris’s shaking shoulder.

At her touch, Iris dropped her hand. Her eyes were red and wet. “If she’s with her dad, she’s finally getting all the support and training that I could never bring myself to give her. I don’t want to drag her back. I just need to know she’s okay.”

“Of course,” Caitlin said.

Two and a half decades ago, she would have reached out to hug the other woman. But that had been a long time ago. So she just rubbed Iris’s shoulder a little bit and dropped her hand.

“We’ll do everything we can,” Cisco said. “But Iris, can I be honest with you?”

“Please,” she said.

“This isn’t a ten minute job. Basically what I have to do is sort through all the multiverses until I figure out which one she created, then vibe backwards along the timeline to figure out when she went back to.” He frowned. “Or maybe the other way around?”

“I knew it was a big ask when I came. I’m just grateful that you’re willing to try.”

“What are friends for?”

Iris managed a smile and checked her watch. “I think I’ve missed the last train back to Metropolis,” she said. “Do you know any good hotels around here that I can stay the night?”

“You can stay here,” Caitlin said immediately.

“Oh, god, no, I couldn’t do that. Just turn up on your doorstep and expect you to put me up?”

“You’re not imposing, I promise. We want you here. It’s been so long. We can catch up a little. You can meet our daughter!”

“Honestly,” Cisco said. “We’d love to have you. Please stay.”

She looked between the two of them. “Well,” she said. “In that case - I’d love to stay.”

“Great,” Caitlin said. “I’ll show you the guest bedroom. Let you get settled in.”

“And I’ll get to work,” Cisco said. “Have you got access to any of her research? Any of her cloud passwords?”

“Oh, this might help,” Iris said, reaching in her purse and pulling out a box about the size of the old smartphones they all used to carry around. “Nora’s home computer. The password is Bartholomew.”

Cisco whistled, reaching out to take it. “Damn, girl, you earned those Pulitzers.”

“You bet I did,” Iris said.

“We were so proud,” Caitlin said, leading the way up the stairs. “When we heard.”

“I’ve been hearing about you,” Iris said, following her. “Frost and Vibe, Coast City’s very own superhero power couple.”

Caitlin laughed a little. “We try.” She suddenly realized something. “Do you have any bags or anything? I can’t believe I forgot to ask.”

“No, nothing,” Iris said. “When I realized what she’d done, I went right to the train station.”

“Well, I can loan you something.” Although they’d never been the same size, or for that matter, the same style. “Or Amazon DroneDrop knows this house pretty well. You can use our account if you need.”

“Oh, it’s fine, I’ve got one. I think I’ll do that.”

“Okay,” Caitlin said. “So, this is the guest room, that’s the house wifi password on the chalkboard there, and we haven’t eaten dinner yet, so that should be maybe an hour? Do you have any dietary restrictions? Cisco does most of the cooking, he can work around just about anything.”

“No,” Iris said, looking a little dazed at the sudden rush of hospitality. “No, I’ll eat anything. It’s fine. Thank you.” She set her purse on the bed, looking around the neat, bright room.

“Okay,” Caitlin said. “Well. I - ” She twisted her wedding ring. “I’ll leave you to get settled. The bathroom is right down the hall.”

Iris said softly, “Thank you so much, Caitlin. For everything.”

She wasn’t sure how to answer that, so she went with the truth. “It really is so good to see you again.”

“You too.”

She started to leave, then paused and came back in. “If you hear thumping on the roof,” she said, “it’s - ” She paused, trying to think how to explain. “It’s okay, it’s fine.”

Iris, already pulling up Amazon on her wrist screen, looked up, brows lifted. “Rebecca?” she said.

“Yeah.”

She nodded once, the nod of a woman who’d seen a lot of metahumans in her lifetime and wasn’t particularly surprised at anything anymore.

Caitlin went downstairs again and found Cisco swiping through screens. He’d clearly gotten into Nora’s computer and hooked it up to the house wifi. “Damn, she’s got a lot of stuff in here,” he said by way of greeting. “But I think I might have found something with this 2017 folder.”

She glanced at the documents spread out on the wall. “It does look promising,” she said. “But we can get back to it. We need to talk about our daughter right now.”

He paused, then minimized the screen with a swipe of his finger and turned in his chair. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, we do.”

* * *

The proximity alarm on the roof went off half an hour later.  Cisco and Caitlin glanced at each other, then both got up and headed up the stairs. This called for a family meeting.

Rebecca didn’t notice them until she’d climbed back in her open window and folded her wings. They went translucent and sank into her skin until they looked like a large, elaborate linework tattoo spread across her shoulder blades.

She hadn’t been allowed to wear tank tops since they had appeared, but she’d bought some on the sly and hid them under her mattress, which had successfully fooled Caitlin for all of ten minutes. She wore one now, a white racerback tank with ample room for her wings to flex. Between that, the wing marks, and the thick dark hair that she wore buzzed close to her scalp, she looked tough and punky, powerful and indomitable.

Caitlin could remember all the times she’d come sobbing to her with some small injury. _Mama fix it, fix it Mama._

She looked up and jumped. “God! You guys! I told you not to come in my room when I’m not here.”

“First off,” Cisco said, leaning ostentatiously on the wall just outside her door, “we’re not in your room. And second of all, you’re not exactly in a position to be making demands, traviesa.”

“Since you are here,” Caitlin said, “we’re coming in.”

Rebecca started to protest, but Caitlin just leveled her most no-nonsense look, and her daughter folded, grumbling. She climbed onto the end of her bed and sat scowling.

Cisco propped his shoulder against the window, looking thunderous. When she caught his expression, Rebecca narrowed her eyes and folded her arms.

Caitlin bit back a sigh.

It was hard to see them like this. Rebecca had always been a daddy’s girl, giggling and conspiring with Cisco. But the first day she’d leapt into the air and done a loop-de-loop over their heads, then landed to see the look of horror on his face, their relationship had started to crumble.

But they had to get through this first. Then maybe they could start patching things up. So she said, “Would you like to explain what happened, young lady?”

“Nothing happened,” her daughter muttered.

“Right, because I got there,” Cisco said.

“I thought we were clear the last time,” Caitlin said. “You are not to go out looking for trouble.”

“I was taking a shortcut!”

“Oh, and your shortcut just happened to include the park with the highest crime rate in the city? Try again,” Cisco invited.

“You never said I couldn’t go there.”

“We never said you couldn’t put on a raw-meat bikini and go swimming with sharks, either, because we didn’t think we had to!”

Caitlin felt they were in danger of spiraling into another father-daughter shouting match. “Enough,” she said. “You went out today hoping to use your powers, which you know we don’t want you to do. And we know you’re frustrated and you want to flex your wings and you want to help. But that’s not the way.”

“But - ” Rebecca started.

“Because we also know who else is out there,” Cisco said. “And what they’re capable of. And believe me, sweetheart, there’s not a single one of them who would take it easy on you because you’re still in high school.”

Rebecca’s chin jutted. “I don’t want them to take it easy on me. I’m not a baby.”

Caitlin went and sat next to her, pulling her close. Rebecca’s body was rigid and unyielding in the circle of her arm. “No,” she said. “You’re not. But, mijita, you’re not an adult, either. You’re still young, you’re still coming into your powers, and you’re more vulnerable than you think.”

Rebecca gave her a little sideways look. Caitlin wondered if she’d had the time to get scared in that park before Cisco had swooped in and given her someone to shout at.

Cisco went down on his knees in front of her, looking up into her face. “And if anything happened to you, your mom and I couldn’t bear it. We’ve lost a lot of people in our lives, but you - that would be worse than all of the others combined.”

She kept her face turned away from her dad, her hand lifting to fiddle with Caitlin’s necklace the way she’d done since she was a baby. “You always tell me to be proud of who I am, but you won’t let me _be_ who I am.”

The words hit Caitlin in the chest like a punch. For a moment she couldn’t breathe, much less reply. Cisco looked just as devastated as she felt.

“We’re trying,” he said finally. “We know you want to use your powers, but we want you to learn how safely and gradually.”

_Not like either of us,_ Caitlin added ruefully, in her head.

“When am I going to get to do that, though?” Rebecca asked.

She clearly hadn’t expected an answer, but Caitlin said, “Your dad and I did some talking, and we’ve come up with a plan that might work for all of us.”

She lifted her head, looking cautious. “Wait, really?”

“First of all,” Caitlin said, holding up her finger, “for today’s little stunt, you’re grounded. For a month.”

“How does that work for me?”

“It works because it’s not two months,” Caitlin said.

Rebecca started to say something, saw the look in her eyes, and clearly reconsidered. She shut her mouth, her lower lip sliding out just a touch.

“During your grounding, you’re going to be training with your powers. And afterwards, you’re going to start patrolling.”

She sat up straight. “Training? Patrolling? You mean it?” She gave Cisco a quick look.

“This is against my better judgement,” Cisco said, scowling. “But you need to learn sometime, and clearly if we don’t teach you, you’ll teach yourself.”

Rebecca let out a squeak and rocked forward to hug him. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, Daddy.”

His arms came around her, holding tight, his face full of emotion.

She pulled away to hug Caitlin around the neck. “Thank you, Mama. This is so ultra-schway!”

Caitlin pressed her cheek to her daughter’s duckling-fuzz head. They didn’t get hugs like this very much anymore.

“Ground rules,” she said, straightening up and looking into her daughter’s face. “You’re with one of us at all times until we decide you’re ready to be on your own.”

Her face fell a little bit, but she nodded.

“School comes first,” Cisco said. “No patrolling on school nights, your grades stay at B or above, all your homework and studying gets finished before you go out.”

“And no patrolling during finals,” Caitlin added.

“But Mama, what if - ”

“None,” Caitlin said.

“Nada,” Cisco reiterated. “And finally, you’re going to take a martial arts class. Hand-to-hand of some kind, we’ll figure one out.”

“Wait,” Rebecca said. “Like, a class with other kids?”

“Other kids, maybe adults. Which means no wings.”

“What’s the point of that?”

“You can’t fly away from every attacker, angelita. There’s always going to be one who brings you down, so you need to learn to fight on the ground too.”

“Okay,” she said reluctantly. “I guess. Can we start training tonight? I have suit ideas. I want to show you my suit ideas.” She grabbed her computer off her desk and was pulling up a folder on the wall when Caitlin held up a hand.

“Tomorrow’s soon enough. We’ve got a house guest.”

She looked like they’d suddenly started speaking Greek. “A what?”

“Not a what, a who. An old friend who dropped in unexpectedly. So you’ve got your choice tonight. You can either help me clean up the living room and set the table, or you’ll help Dad with dinner.”

Rebecca chewed her lip. “I can help Dad with dinner,” she said.

Cisco blinked, then rallied. “All right. It’s chicken enchilada night, so get downstairs and pull four - ” He paused, eying her. Whenever she flew, her appetite doubled. “Make that five chicken breasts out of the freezer to thaw.”

Rebeca reached for the hoodie hanging from her bedpost, and Caitlin said, “You don’t have to wear that tonight if you don’t want to.”

She paused, her eyes going big. “But - my - ” She touched her shoulder where the tip of a black feather showed on her skin.

“Iris West-Allen is an old friend,” Caitlin said. “She’s known us a long time. All about us. We’d like her to get to know you, too.”

“Oh,” Rebecca said, eyes still wide. She considered her hoodie, then picked it up, tying it around her waist, where she could pull it on easily if she didn’t feel like showing her shoulders and back.

She slid out of her room, pausing for the briefest second at the open door of the guest room to glance in. Then she was gone down the stairs.

Cisco let out his breath. “You sure about this?” he asked, sliding his arm around Caitlin’s waist.

She rested her head against his. “Honestly? No. But she’s got to start somewhere.”

He nuzzled her hairline. “I still don’t know what we’re going to do with this kid of ours.”

She kissed him. “Right now? You’re going to go make chicken enchiladas together.”

FINIS


End file.
